Past masters

The Victorian city is a byword for poverty, pollution and disease. But 19th century municipal visionaries like Joseph Chamberlain have much to teach us about revitalising our urban centres, argues historian Tristram Hunt

Past masters

The Victorian city is a byword for poverty, pollution and disease. But 19th century municipal visionaries like Joseph Chamberlain have much to teach us about revitalising our urban centres, argues historian Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 2 June 2004 11.29 EDT
First published on Wednesday 2 June 2004 11.29 EDT

Reflecting upon his municipal career, mayor Joseph Chamberlain said of the half-century of radical improvements he had witnessed in Birmingham: "Formerly, it was badly lighted, imperfectly guarded, and only partially drained; there were few public buildings and few important streets ... But now, great public edifices not unworthy of the importance of a midland metropolis have risen on every side. Rookeries and squalid courts have given way to fine streets and open places. The roads are well paved, well kept, well lighted, and well cleansed ... Baths and wash-houses are provided at a nominal cost to the users. Free libraries and museums of art are open to all the inhabitants ... "

It was an impressive list. Beginning with municipalising gas and water, then establishing art galleries, erecting new housing, and regenerating the city centre, Chamberlain's 1870s administration had turned Birmingham from a rotten borough into, as one magazine put it, "the best-governed city in the world."

Victorian Birmingham, with its vibrant manufacturing base and tight-knit social underpinnings, is certainly a long way from the modern service-oriented, multi-cultural British city. But I believe this history of urban endeavour - of civic pride and council activism - can offer some valuable lessons for modern policy-makers.

The latter half of the 19th century witnessed an unprecedented determination on behalf of central and local government, working with civil society, to improve the urban infrastructure. And they were faced with quite a challenge. Though today we are used to images of the São Paulo slums, the street children of Bogota, or the scavengers of Manila, eyewitness accounts of the early Victorian city remain startling.

From the mounds of human excrement in the street to the dissolute gin palaces, from the smog-inducing factories to the dark and dank lodging houses, Britain's industrialising cities were a scene of unmitigated horror. One contemporary described Manchester's streets as "unpaved and without drains or main-sewers" and "so covered with refuse and excrementitious matter as to be almost impassable from depth of mud, and intolerable from stench".

Amid the squalor and open latrines lurked death. Typhoid, typhus, small-pox, cholera, rickets, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and diarrhoea thrived in the early Victorian city. Edwin Chadwick, the public health campaigner, suggested that "the annual slaughter in England and Wales from preventable causes of typhus, which attacks persons in the vigour of life, appears to be double the amount of what was suffered by the Allied armies in the battle of Waterloo." Shockingly, the life chances of a slum-dweller in early Victorian Glasgow or Liverpool were, in fact, the lowest since the Black Death in the 14th century.

Yet by the 1890s, while problems certainly persisted, the Victorian city had become a model of urban civilisation. Parks and wash-houses, schools and universities, town halls and public squares, galleries and museums dotted the city landscape. A tangible sense of civic pride had emerged, focused around the actions and ethics of local councils.

However, the first lesson of this transformation applies to central government. The history of 19th-century governance clearly shows that devolved power attracts local talent. When Chamberlain arrived in Birmingham in 1854 from London, the council was in a miserable state, run by a cabal of reactionary shopkeepers. As Westminster pushed power to the cities and local government enthusiastically grabbed it, influential and talented individuals started to put themselves forward for office.

In Birmingham, the proportion of substantial businessmen on the council grew three-fold. It became, according to one observer, "the ambition of young men, and cultivated men, and men of high social position to represent a ward and to become aldermen and mayors..." The Times went so far as to contend that "perhaps no such capable and enterprising men have ever met together on an English public body as gathered round Mr Chamberlain on the Birmingham council".

The same could have been said of 1890s London when, with John Burns and Sidney Webb at the helm, the Progressives wrestled control of the London county council and instituted the capital's most radical period of governance. Yet progressive centralisation during the 20th century has frequently encouraged the best and brightest to bypass local government for Westminster.

What the transformation of the Victorian city also shows is the need for local fiscal freedom. Chamberlain's municipalisation of Birmingham's gas and water supplies - an innovative public-private partnership if ever there was one - and subsidising of art with the profits is the sort of financial freewheeling that gives today's Treasury the jitters. Similarly, the Metropolitan Board of Works' funding of Joseph Bazalgette's sewerage masterplan for London, and the costs incurred by Glasgow council's tramway development, represent the kind of capital investment that is now the subject of ceaseless Whitehall interference.

By the 1900s, the allegedly parsimonious Victorians had run up local authority debts of £400m. Today, mayor Ken Livingstone is prevented by ministers from issuing public bonds and remains embarrassingly unable to raise capital funds for the trans-London transport project, CrossRail. Meanwhile, local government minister Nick Raynsford is cheerily re-introducing ratecapping on high-tax councils.

What we remember about the Victorian city is its aesthetic: Manchester town hall, Birmingham's Victoria Square, Liverpool's Albert Dock, Bradford's Wool Exchange. The 19th century's council leaders believed in public space and the edification of the civic realm through design. "I have an abiding faith in municipal institutions," announced Chamberlain as he laid the Council House foundation stone, "an abiding sense of the value and importance of local self-government, and I desire therefore tosurround them by everything which can mark their importance."

Over the course of the 20th century, brutalist urban design and second world war German bombs managed to undo much of this civic heritage. But now, at last, cities are starting to appreciate their Victorian legacy as a welcoming urban environment becomes a vital component of economic regeneration.

This would not be news to Chamberlain, who redeveloped Birmingham city centre with an eye both to social improvement and economic growth. From the slums of St Mary's emerged Corporation Street, New Street, Hill Street and the mock-Venetian Council House. He married fiscal cunning with urban redevelopment. But this policy of "municipal capitalism" never lost sight of the need to safeguard the aesthetic dignity of the city. What emerged were boulevards of Parisian stature and public squares worthy of St Mark's in Venice. A balancing act not altogether followed by his successors, who have allowed a McDonald's restaurant to disfigure the once wondrous Chamberlain Square.

So much of what current local government lacks is a Victorian sense of purpose. What Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool enjoyed in the 19th century was an idea of mission: councils were not just service providers, but vehicles of civic pride and identity. "There is no nobler sphere for those who have not the opportunity of engaging in imperial politics than to take part in municipal work," declared Chamberlain.

Yet we should also be aware of the limitations of this historical comparison. Reforms to the political franchise, changes brought by race and gender politics, and markedly different attitudes to class and deference make the dynamic authoritarianism of Chamberlain's Birmingham unlikely to be repeated.

Meanwhile, the loss of Empire has meant that parliament has retreated to a far narrower concern with local politics. But, above all, the collapse of local business networks has destroyed the economic foundations of Victorian civic pride.

Perhaps this is why the shadow of mayor Chamberlain still looms. Not just because of his fiscal and political innovations. Rather, he symbolises a lost era of cultural swagger and civic pride, of self-government and independence.

Rebuilding civic pride will not be easy. But the first steps demand Whitehall letting go: cutting back on ring-fencing and rate-capping while returning the business rate to councils. With autonomy and fiscal credibility, talent will follow. Our cities also need a revival of commercial and civic patronage - rather than looking for glory in London, we need to develop a form of local honours (freedom of the city?) and tax breaks to nurture urban philanthropy.

A system of civic lotteries might help. Business Improvement Districts and strong civic universities should lead inner-city regeneration, but to keep residents within the city it is vital that local schools receive the funding and support to prevent a flight to the suburbs. But our cities also need a restatement of purpose in local government: a confident, new municipal gospel. This is the Joseph Chamberlain agenda of the 21st century.

· Tristram Hunt's new book, Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £25. To order a copy for £22 plus p&p call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875. www.buildingjerusalem.com